Wednesday, June 10, 2015

VMware’s Brave New IT A summary of Eric Gales, VP of VMware Canada’s Presentation

Eric has been with VMware for two years; prior to that he was with Microsoft. There is 3 things Eric wants to provide perspective on during his presentation; the Market according to Gartner, VMware’s perspective and Eric’s own insight.

Eric starts with Nicholas G Carr’s book, “Does IT Matter”. Nicholas the author, prophesized that IT would go the way of electricity. Once upon a time if you had it, it was a competitive advantage as others did not. When everyone had electricity it was no longer of significant value as it became an assumed and a necessity. In this sense Eric mentions Nicholas was both right and wrong.

Eric references Netflix, and Amazon, YouTube and Uber whose business models did not exist when the book was written. So the wrong part was that IT would cease. IT did not cease but rather grew to support new business models.

VMware believes that these new business models are good examples of what it calls a liquid world. Companies that don’t adapt will be gone like the Blockbusters of the world (sorry Blockbuster, I still miss video store Friday’s) . The liquid world is a more adaptable environment which has also created a new scale of non-traditional competitors; Amazon is now considering large scale entry into the grocery market for example and Apple is moving into the credit card transaction business. Traditional manufacturers such as the auto industry are worrying about the threat from silicon valley.

Digital transformation is the new business agenda requiring enterprises to:

Drive Operational efficiency

Increase Employee Productivity

Develop Stronger Customer Loyalty

Find New revenue streams

Digital Transformation is Fueled by the 3rd Platform (the 3rd Platform is an IDC term used to describe the convergence of Mobility, Data Analytics, Social Networks and Cloud). Enterprises will either adapt or be exposed to these new market conditions brought on by the 3rd Platform.

Eric mentions if he were to rewrite the book he would call it “What IT Matters?” For example infrastructure is not critical but necessary. IT must appreciate that more than ever it must be an enabler to business initiatives. IT must drive innovation to ensure they are relevant to the business.

The focus areas for innovation are business growth, the experience to deliver a greater customer experience and more adaptable security to manage all the risk in a highly mobile world.

The driving forces behind VMware’s liquid world concept are mobility and cloud. Devices will communicate between themselves with more autonomy from end users (the Internet of Things “IoT”).

The new model for IT is defined by the following service characteristics

Instant & Accessible

Fluid & Adaptable

Secure & Mobile

Collectively VMware calls this shift the Brave New IT. VMware has been fearless innovators in this field. In response to the challenge from the market that hypervisors are commodity, Eric clarifies that “hypervising” or running multiple OS instances on a single set of resources is a commodity. The hypervisor however, is not as they are all fundamentally different depending on the vendor. VMware for example links theirs to higher value in software defined networking, storage, hybrid security and mobility workspace to create a clear differentiator.

VMware unifies these technologies through the Software Defined Datacenter (“SDC”). VMware believes that both the Enterprise and DevOps can share this single SDC platform. This is a great value proposition for VMware’s customers. This software can be built on whatever foundational hardware you would like; Converged, Hyper-Converged or Cloud. The services living in the datacenter can be delivered to any endpoint including machine-to-machine (the internet of things “IoT”).

Eric switches to IDCs perspective and how the new focus is on outcome and value vs. infrastructure. A value added reseller needs to consider selling to both IT and the business. The business value requires greater emphasis than ever before. “We need to help our clients innovate”. “To service our customers we need to know their business”. IT is more critical today then it has ever been, but it is evolving. Value added resellers are also transforming to become strategic partner to their customers business.

Eric sites the organizations who are largely outsourced, they face a significant challenge as they are locked into a legacy way of doing things. Many are looking hard to repatriate in order to bring back innovation.

Eric pulls up a slide that shows VMware’s Strategic focus areas and how they align strongly with necessary change in the enterprise to meet these challenges.

Eric ends with a commitment to VMware’s partners to help them deliver innovation to their customers.

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About Me

I am a Principal Cloud Architect at Long View Systems and have spent 16 years designing, implementing, and managing IT Infrastructures in highly available computing environments. My primary areas of focus are the deployment of virtualization (Server, Storage, Desktop, Application and WAN Optimization).